The Dissolve Alfonso Cuarón might direct the Harry Potter spinoff Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them. The internet seems largely happy about this which puzzles me. I understand everyone likes money but isn't this a huge step backwards after Children of Men/Gravity gave us his full auteurist muscle unbeholden to someone else's franchise? I most definitely think soPajiba wonders what was up with that airplane curtain closing wordless scene on Mad Men this weekend? The Film Doctor asks 9 questions about Godzilla before realizing he's too old for that shit. (I loved Godzilla so much myself that I've been surprised at the level of thumbs down in comments and online) /bent wonders why The Kids Are All Right's director Lisa Cholodenko hasn't yet made a follow up to that financially successful and Oscar nominated feature

Towleroad one of the Vikings in How To Train Your Dragon 2 comes out as gay kinda. (But ParaNorman will always be first in this regard.)Antagony & Ecstasy on the intuitive, fluid sensory experience of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and its companion novelSlate Cliff Curtis, ethnic chameleon onscreen Gawker "selfie" is entering the dictionary. But why did it take "steampunk" this long?MNPP JA zeroes in on one sweaty hairy detail of the Weinstein Co's Cannes preview: Southpaw's Jake Gyllenhaal The Wire wonders why the internet is so obsessed with Shrek -- I hadn't realized it was (just goes to show you how the interenet is not at all monolithic in terms of its obsessions -- but this is an interesting articleThe New Yorker if you're still grappling with your feelings about Godzilla here's a smart mixed take from Richard Brody which wrestles with the movies grandeur but lack of complexity and its largely passive human characters

Its scale may feel Biblical, but it doesn’t risk the crises and ecstasies, the sheer moral turbulence provoked by existential menace (cf. “Noah”). The monsters in the movie do monstrous battle, while people—the warriors ostensibly arrayed on the front lines against them—are reduced in the foreground to silhouetted spectators. They are the equivalent of the cutout characters of “Mystery Science Theatre 3000,” but without the comfort of a screen to separate them from the mayhem...

He Said / She SaidRogerEbert.com, which I always feel weird about linking to, since the link name always implies that Roger Ebert has written something new but he has of course departed from our mortal coil. Nevertheless, I started to enjoy these opposing pieces from Michael Oleszczyk and Barbara Scharres on David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars until I remembered after the first couple of paragraphs each that I really really really want to go into this one fresh so I can't read anything. BUT if you're not as "sensitive" as I am about reading reviews before you've seen a movie, that's one rave and one pan from the same site so we are now free to call the movie "divisive" as often as we'd like. It's our favorite kind of critical response - homogeneity being so dreadfully dull. Oleszczyk and Richard Lawson at Vanity Fair both rave about Julianne Moore's performance and that's enough to excite me for now without really reading anything!

Speaking of Julianne Moore...

Here she is with Harrison Ford at a party at Cannes. Remember when nobody knew who she was but her walk in The Fugitive (1993) was so grabby anyway? #whowasthat

The idea of Cuaron working on a huge canvas kid's adventure film is really exciting to me, as a fan of both The Little Princess and his Harry Potter movie. He's a collaborative dude and I'm sure won't have any trouble working with JK Rowling, and if anything, his influence on the film's development can really only help make it better, no? I don't see any down side here.

Yeah, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find them isn't even a story. It's like a little encyclopedia of magical creatures. So the story for the movie(s) will be almost entirely original, just set in the same world as the Harry Potter stories.

I am excited if the Cuaron thing happens. I love the Harry Potter universe and while I don't think any of the movies are masterpieces, the third one is really really good, so him working in this world again and with a new story is exciting. Also, I kinda think that this might be on of those Nolan-kind deals he made with WB in that if he makes it and it makes money, they'll give him full freedom on whatever it is he wants to do next.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is definitely my favorite in that series, with Cuarón presenting the world exactly as I'd imagined it in the books. I'm thrilled about the possibility of him directing this one too!